All data on completed medical experiments are to be made available to the general public by GlaxoSmithKline, the biggest UK pharmaceutical company. The announcement is a major win for the AllTrials campaign mounted by healthcare activists as well as researchers that has gathered widespread support.

Support has flooded in from groups like the U.S. National Physicians Alliance, the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care and the UK Medical Research Council, as well as from the British Library and the British Medical Journal.

Paroxetine - better known as Paxil in the U.S. - is an antidepressant that was licensed only for adults. Doctors are allowed to prescribe it to children and teenagers if they think it will help their patient, a practice called "off-label" prescribing, an effort GlaxoSmithKline has supported covertly for many years.

Healy discovered that hundreds of children had been recruited from around the world to take part in three clinical trials. One group was given the drug, the other a placebo. They were randomized controlled trials (RCT) where neither the children nor their doctors knew whether they were taking the active drug or the placebo until the end of the study. This is widely accepted as the best way of working out whether a drug causes a particular effect: the gold standard in terms of evidence.

But the outcome of these the trials was not what GlaxoSmithKline had been hoping for. Paroxetine proved no better than placebo. In the biggest trial, Study 329, which was conducted across several sites in the U.S., 11 of the 93 children who took paroxetine developed serious side-effects; seven had to be hospitalized. Significantly more had self-harmed or attempted suicide on the drug than on placebo.

The data was finally published starting in 2002 by Shelley Jofre, an investigative reporter with the BBC. (Read her story on CorpWatch here)

GlaxoSmithKline went beyond just suppressing the evidence, it “participated in preparing, publishing and distributing a misleading medical journal article,” according to the U.S Department of Justice, while it “sponsored dinner programs, lunch programs, spa programs and similar activities to promote the use of Paxil in children and adolescents. GSK paid a speaker to talk to an audience of doctors and paid for the meal or spa treatment for the doctors who attended.”

In July 2012 GlaxoSmithKline agreed to pay out $3 billion to settle the charges on bupropion and paroxetine (as well as their failure to report safety data about the drug Avandia to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration) – the largest such fine ever paid by a pharmaceutical company.

“Is this just a cure for Glaxo's own ills?” wrote the Independent newspaper. “The drugs giant is to lay bare its research findings in a groundbreaking move. But it may be clever PR rather than altruism.”